---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine <levinebar@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 9:27 AM
Subject: re: The Inequality Problem
To: "letters@nytimes.com" <letters@nytimes.com>

To the Editor:

    It is easy--albeit trivial--to agree with David Brooks that unemployment and bad schools afflict the poor. But when he asserts that income disparity isn't the problem, he's attacking a strawman.  Gross income disparities are only a symptom, but they are a symptom of a society in which the wealthy few disproportionately write the rules we all live by. That correlation has been illustrated by Acemoglu and Robinson for many societies of the past, and should guide us in making policies for our future. Their book is called "Why Nations Fail".

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/17/opinion/brooks-the-inequality-problem.html

The Inequality Problem

JAN. 16, 2014

Suddenly the whole world is talking about income inequality. But, as this debate goes on, it is beginning to look as though the thing is being misconceived. The income inequality debate is confusing matters more than clarifying them, and it is leading us off in unhelpful directions.

In the first place, to frame the issue as income inequality is to lump together different issues that are not especially related. What we call “inequality” is caused by two different constellations of problems.

At the top end, there is the growing wealth of the top 5 percent of workers. This is linked to things like perverse compensation schemes on Wall Street, assortative mating (highly educated people are more likely to marry each other and pass down their advantages to their children) and the superstar effect (in an Internet economy, a few superstars in each industry can reap global gains while the average performers cannot).

At the bottom end, there is a growing class of people stuck on the margins, generation after generation. This is caused by high dropout rates, the disappearance of low-skill jobs, breakdown in family structures and so on.

If you have a primitive zero-sum mentality then you assume growing affluence for the rich must somehow be causing the immobility of the poor, but, in reality, the two sets of problems are different, and it does no good to lump them together and call them “inequality.”

Second, it leads to ineffective policy responses. If you think the problem is “income inequality,” then the natural response is to increase incomes at the bottom, by raising the minimum wage.

But raising the minimum wage may not be an effective way to help those least well-off. Joseph J. Sabia of San Diego State University and Richard V. Burkhauser of Cornell looked at the effects of increases in the minimum wage between 2003 and 2007. Consistent with some other studies, they find no evidence that such raises had any effect on the poverty rates.

That’s because raises in the minimum wage are not targeted at the right people. Only 11 percent of the workers affected by such an increase come from poor households. Nearly two-thirds of such workers are the second or third earners living in households at twice the poverty line or above.

The primary problem for the poor is not that they are getting paid too little for the hours they work. It is that they are not working full time or at all. Raising the minimum wage is popular politics; it is not effective policy.

Third, the income inequality frame contributes to our tendency to simplify complex cultural, social, behavioral and economic problems into strictly economic problems.